Featured Exhibition
The exhibition Beauty is a Blast, on view at Art Cake in Brooklyn, brings together the work of more than 200 artists in a posthumous examination of the life and influence of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (1945–2024). It documents a network of relationships, of pedagogy, of influence. Conceived by artist and curator Christian Haub in 2021 as a modest acknowledgment of Gilbert-Rolfe’s legacy, the project was paused, then resumed in late 2024 in collaboration with Gilbert-Rolfe’s family and the Art Cake team. As word spread, the exhibition grew, not by design, but by response. The scale—over 250 works—became a measure of the reach of an individual who spent decades thinking through the terms and implications of contemporary abstraction.
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Gilbert-Rolfe’s influence was intellectual as much as aesthetic. His paintings—formally rigorous and optically charged—operated in dialogue with his writing, particularly texts such as Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime and Beyond Piety, which challenged dominant frameworks in art theory. His teaching, likewise, left an imprint of critical method. The artists represented in the show include peers, students, and collaborators—from canonical names like John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, Robert Ryman, Dorothea Rockburne, and David Smith, to younger voices shaped by Gilbert-Rolfe’s instruction and discourse.
The exhibition includes a selection of Gilbert-Rolfe’s own works dating back to 1968, placed in a spatial and conceptual conversation with the contributions of others. A focused group show, Painting on Air—his final curatorial project—is presented in abbreviated form, with individual works by Gilbert-Rolfe, Christian Haub, Clinton Hill, and Nicola Staeglïch. Additional rooms are devoted to Gilbert-Rolfe’s drawings and paper-based works from the 1970s through his final year, as well as to collaborative works and curatorial exchanges between Gilbert-Rolfe and Haub. A selection of books by Gilbert-Rolfe and his peers is also included, further emphasizing the exhibition as a site of thinking as much as looking.
Christian Haub, who has shown internationally since the 1980s, works with color, transparency, and form through his Plexiglass constructions and paintings. He shares with Gilbert-Rolfea a deep engagement with abstraction as a sustained philosophical concern. Haub’s art history background and receipt of the Rome Prize in 1983 position his work within a broader historical continuum that includes Matisse, Mondrian, and Ryman. Beauty is a Blast proposes that Gilbert-Rolfe’s impact persists across evolving inquiries and practices. The show is not an endpoint but a field of relations—unfinished, open, and ongoing.
Photos courtesy of Vera Miljkovic
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Beauty is a Blast
Closing Party, April 27, 4-7 PM
Exhibition Dates: April 6 – April 27, 2025
Location: Art Cake, 214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232, United States